Even after a week of being interrogated in an Iranian prison, Kylie Moore-Gilbert had no doubt her captors would soon realise they'd made a mistake and release her.

Despite the privacy invasion, she gave up her email passwords because, as she tells ABC RN's Between the Lines, "I had nothing to hide".

Unfortunately, her innocence wasn't enough to protect her.

She didn't know it then but Dr Moore-Gilbert, a Melbourne-based scholar of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, was at the start of a years-long nightmare.

For the next 804 days, she would endure solitary confinement, psychological torture and degrading, dehumanising treatment at the hands of her captors.

Now that she's finally home, she wants Australia and other countries to reconsider the way they deal with hostages, so that others who are still imprisoned in foreign countries have a stronger chance of being freed.

'I was told I'm an Australian spy'

Dr Moore-Gilbert was arrested in 2018 in Tehran, where she'd been invited by an Iranian university to attend an academic conference.

She'd applied for a visa in advance at the Iranian embassy in Canberra. This wasn't a requirement for Australians, who can get a visa upon arrival. However, as she says, "I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt and allow them to look into my background.

"Given it's an authoritarian regime, you assume they will".

The visa was approved and Dr Moore-Gilbert saw no indication there would be any issues travelling to the conference. She'd travelled to numerous Middle Eastern countries in the past and never had a problem.

But at the Tehran airport, as she was preparing to make her way home, Dr Moore-Gilbert was arrested by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), also known as the Revolutionary Guards.

This former militia group has extended to "literally cover every aspect of Iranian economic and social governmental life as well as obviously military capabilities," she says.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-10/kylie-moore-gilbert-speaks-about-804-days-in-iranian-prison/101030248